World War: AT SEA: The U.S. Navy Finds Trouble

Along the 60th parallel, on the chilled hell’s highway of the north Atlantic, the U.S. last week lost the illusion that it was not engaged in a shooting war.

The illusion faded when the U.S.S. Kearny (rhymes with Blarney), a crack destroyer scarcely a year in service, was torpedoed. But the illusion did not disappear until the nation felt the dull visceral shock of reading its first casualty list of World War II, reading of its own men “The next of kin have been notified.”

But if its sensations finally forced the U.S. to acknowledge that it was engaged in a shooting war, the facts that came out last week were even more convincing. They showed that the U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic Patrol, which has expected trouble ever since the occupation of Iceland, has been actively looking for trouble since Franklin Roosevelt’s “shoot on sight” speech of Sept. u.

History Rewritten. The most striking evidence of that was almost overlooked in last week’s excitement over the Kearny. The Navy’s Chief of Operations, Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark, told the Senate Naval Affairs Committee in a letter the facts about the brush of the old four-piper U.S.S. Greer with a submarine last month (TIME, Sept. 15).

“Betty” Stark’s statement revised one historical point: the Greer, which the U.S. public had believed attacked by a U-boat without provocation, was in fact attacked while she was dogging a submarine. The destroyer was heading for Iceland with mail, passengers and freight, he wrote, when a British patrol plane reported a sub ten miles dead ahead.

The Greer picked up the U-boat on her detecting apparatus, followed it, keeping astern. The British plane dropped four depth charges and pulled out for home, probably short of gas. For more than three hours the Greer hung on, broadcast the sub’s position—probably cursing the failure of British destroyers to turn up—but making no attack, for at that time the shoot-on-sight order had not been issued. The Greer was following her instructions of spotting and making known the presence of a sea raider in the Western Hemi sphere.

Finally the submarine showed fight. She changed course, closed with the Greer. With every man on the Greer at battle station, the lookouts sighted an impulse bubble close aboard—the big globule of air which rises when a submarine fires a torpedo. The submarine had fired without raising her periscope, aiming by her sound equipment.

It was a close miss. Within a minute the Greer sighted the bubbling wake of the torpedo about 100 yards astern. By that time the little 1,090-ton destroyer had begun to wheel, was steaming swiftly toward the spot where she had seen the impulse bubble. Over the spot the men on her fantail dumped eight depth charges. They sent up green geysers in the chill air. But the Greer could still hear the sub under way.

Two minutes after the depth charges were dropped a second torpedo was sighted 500 yards off the Greer’s starboard bow. The Greer went searching. That afternoon she picked up the submarine again, closed, attacked with depth charges, eleven this time. But the U-boat apparently got away to report: two days later Germany announced its version of the encounter.

The Greer was lucky. Had a torpedo caught her fairly, she would almost certainly have foundered, for her World War I skin is thin.

History Made. Better fitted to take a blow from her natural enemy was the U.S.S. Kearny, a slim, 1,630-ton beauty with a battle speed of around 40 knots. Besides modern armament (including ten torpedo tubes, five 5-inch guns), the Kearny has the maximum in destroyer protection. Highly compartmented so that damage can be localized, she also has a stout double bottom to cut down torpedo damage to her inner skin.

If the Greer was dogging an enemy submarine even before the shoot-on-sight order, there is little doubt that since that order other destroyers have not only been dogging but dropping depth charges on every U-boat their finders locate.

First news of the Kearny’s brush came from her gamecock (5 ft. 2% in.) skipper, 42-year-old Lieut. Commander Anthony Leo Danis. It was brief; onetime Airshipman Danis wanted no German raider to spot him through radio messages. Net of his message: the Kearny, torpedoed 350 miles southwest of Iceland, was proceeding to port under her own power.

Two days later came a few more details. The Kearny had got to Iceland. The U.S. public had assumed that there were no casualties. Now it learned that eleven of the Kearny’s crew were “missing,” presumably trapped in a ruptured watertight compartment. Barring a miracle, they were dead. Ten more of the Kearny’s crew (13 officers, 177 men) were injured, two of them seriously. Navy men were not surprised. They had waited with forboding. They knew that when a torpedo hits a destroyer, somebody usually dies.

Adolf Hitler tried to make the U.S. be lieve that the Kearny was escorting a convoy. From Berlin came a claim that a convoy had been attacked after it entered Germany’s combat zone, that ten freighters and two “enemy destroyers” had been sunk. The location was close to the spot where the Kearny was hit. But the fact was that the Kearny, like the Greer, was out sub-hunting when she was hit.

When the Kearny was struck, to her side steamed a slim, salt-crusted four-piper with signal flags whipping from her bridge. It was the U.S.S. Greer.